Writing is both mask and unveiling.  ~E.B. White






The blogger sits in a dark basement with his hands resting silently on his keyboard.  There was a time in his life when he found it easy to sit down and spill out the contents of his life into the virtual universe for public consumption.  The blogger used to find what he thought was healing and peace in the act of opening up his inane diary for the world to sift through like discarded items at a pawn shop.  He once found a sense of purpose and relief in sharing his experiences, fears, apparent lack of common sense, and his reflections of Autism with whomever came upon his blog.  For seven years his shamelessness had no limits as he opened up the closet door of his soul to let the world take inventory of his collection of circus performing skeletons.  The words were never hard to find.  They came pouring into his psyche from some invisible angel who would whisper them into The Blogger's ear so he could pass them off as his own creation.  The dynamic was much like the play  "Cyrano de Bergerac" or the movie that it spawned "Roxanne" staring Steve Martin.



The Blogger often thought
his muse looked a lot like this.


Most of the time The Blogger spent detailing his families journey into the corn maze of autism.  He often found himself writing with the adrenaline someone feels when they are sitting on the verge of complete heartbreak.  While his words where never poetic they were drenched in the very emotion he was feeling at the time.  Every entry would serve as the lyrics to whatever uneven and over-produced song was banging in the caverns of his mind.   The Blogger's content was never life changing or ground breaking.  It was often never spelled checked and was woven together with more grammatical errors than a five page paper about The War of 1812 that had been penned by a badger.





The Blogger has always been a serious introvert and that was something that used to cause him a few moments of worry as his finger would hover over the "Publish" button before he would eventually gather enough courage to close his eyes and hang his mental and emotional laundry on the line for everyone to see it.  He never really understood the reasons he blogged in the first place.  It was so counter to how he usually lived his life.  The Blogger was always acutely aware that people would consider his entries as some sort of desperate cry for help.  In his heart he knew that despite what any of his readers might have considered, that his blogging project  was never about banging a gong for the world to see him or give him a pat on the back and say "Thats alright Champ, we're praying for you".  The blogger understood that whenever he sat down to appease the chattering monkey in his head that it would appear as if he was an egomaniac who thought that the world revolved around him and his problems.  He was certain that his blog was going to be labeled as a serious "Vanity Project".  He always worked hard to make sure it wasn't...even if at times he accomplished that feat by lying to himself. 

"After all" he thought "How can I be accused of being so self-centered if at most times it doesn't even feel like I am the one writing?"  So write he did...but not anymore.  The Blogger was stilled by something as unknown to him as the force that convinced him to start writing in the first place.  After many nights of closing down his computer without one word making it past his emotional editor (who incidently looked a lot like the librarian apparition in the movie "Ghosts Busters") The Blogger began to worry that maybe he would never be able to craft another entry.


"Shhh...don't piss off your internal editor....who apparently needs a tan."


In the quiet darkness of his basement The Blogger sits frozen in front of the blazing white computer monitor. The glare from the screen splashes a few of the shadows off of his face just enough to see his lips pursed with worry.  The fingers of The Blogger are perched on the keyboard for the what seems to be the 100th time in as many nights.  They are ready to perform their dance across the buttons with fading letters on them...but they are unable to move.  Every now and again his fingers start to spell out some words on the screen in front of them, but they are always the wrong ones and they are deleted with one soft click of the seemingly overused delete button.

Tonight felt different though.  He had finally figured out what was causing him to be unable to write anymore.  The truth behind his struggle was revealed with one simple question by his autistic son.  Noah had asked in a moment of anguish "Why can't I be normal?"  It was a question that hung in the air like the thick cloud of 30-year old perfume you might walk through in a nursing home,  It had been a question that woke The Blogger up from his slumber and gave him the kick in the ass he needed to write again.  But before he wrote anything he had to focus on the question his pancake-wide eyed son had asked him.  Noah needed an answer....and The Blogger did his best to answer it....and with each word he whispered to his son The Blogger was praying that the words were not coming from him but from some divine source that was using him as a puppet.  (this conversation will be the subject of a different blog entry down the line)

Fresh from that moment The Blogger sat down to write about what it is like to have a conversation with a ten-year old who is starting to gain some awareness of the things that are separating him from the other children his age.  And as he thought about what he wanted to write he was surprised that it was less about what he told his son than it was about how he felt afterwards in the wake of his own thoughts.  What he wants to write should not create such an internal struggle...but it does. He has an admiission to make.  It's a confession that would probably not come as a surprise to many of the people who might read it, but to him it was something that needed to be said out loud so that he could come to grips with the implications of it.   There were no words even though his brain was racing.  Like a car with a broken starter the entry he wanted to write never ignited and roared to life.  For a few hours The Blogger thought that maybe he couldn't write this entry because he was filled to the rim with the poison of ego or hubris and those unfortunate personality characteristics kept him from making his much needed public confession.  What was on his heart  sat inside him  like a large plate of undigested food from The Country Buffet.


What emotional turmoil looks like.


For seven years The Blogger had filled up countless of pages with his usually clumsy thoughts about the world, his fear of clowns, movies, or how he believes that Mother Nature is bidding her time in the shadows to strike when he wasn't prepared. (more than likely in the form of a bear or some sort of rare plague from The Amazon) Often times the theme of his entries were centered on his families experience navigating the rough seas of Autism.  Those many times The Blogger shared his experiences from inside the eye of the spectrum of ASD he intentionally laced those pieces with seeds of self-righteousness.  Those little seeds inside his blog would indicate to the reader that he was subject to some sort of inspired knowledge on how to be a good parent of a child living with Autism....which could not have been further from the truth.  The Blogger was just as broken as anyone who watches over a child who is living with a disability. 

He didn't own any wisdom, although the way he wrote it would appear as if he had some sort of direct help telephone line to the divine engineer who created Autism and allowed it into the fragile brains of scores of children.  The Blogger was lost....but that didn't keep him from writing about it.  He wrote about Autism like it was starting to soften it's tight grip on his family. What he didn't know was that the grip had not loosened one bit.  He was just too busy writing about how awesome he was to notice. 


"Its not denial.  I'm just selective about the reality I accept." - Bill Watterson


For those seven years The Blogger took whomever read his blog into his families journey.  He wrote about the struggles as his beloved son worked so hard to connect to the outside world.  He detailed about the zig-zaggy path his son took from being unable to speak or communicate without screaming at five years old to being the sometimes-too talky ten year old by he became.   He wrote about how lucky he and his wife were that there son was starting to fashion a key out of stone to open up the cell door of Autism's ugly spectrum. The error he made was writing as if everything was going perfectly and that eventually his little boy would one day emerge from the fog of Autism and write a book about how incredible his dad was.  For a while The Blogger had convinced himself that his inability to write about autism anymore was the direct result of the fact that it was no longer a major issue in his families life.

What an idiot.

The reality was that The Blogger bought  the same overpriced and shiny lie he was selling everyone else.  The confession that he needed to make was that although he was writing about how much progress his little boy had made there was still an elephant in the room that was holding a bazooka.  That despite all the victories we had made the war was never going to be over.  Never. Ever.  There was not going to ever be a blog entry where The Blogger would sit down and write about how his boy was outside of the maze looking in. 

Yes it had been true that his son, Noah had made so much progress (due to his amazing courage and wonderful specialists) in the therapy and class rooms and was figuring out how to access certain parts of his brain that had been frozen like Han Solo in carbonite.  The problem was Autism just changed the front lines of this war from the therapy room to the playground. 

Earlier in the day as The Blogger was comforting his son he realized that despite of all the progress they had made together over the years that Autism was still trying to dig a moat around his child.  Socially the world was becoming very hard for Noah to interpret.   He is staring at his teenage years and every day he is facing new and very tricky social situations that he is struggling with.  Every day it seemed that any of the obstacles that Noah was facing weren't just about motor skills or cognitive function anymore.  The obstacles had mutated into things like not being able to read non-verbal gestures of his classmates.  These new problems were much more terrifying for The Blogger to deal with as a father.  These were problems that were going to lead to more questions from Noah about being "normal" and why "he isn't invited to sleep overs".  

The Blogger feels just as hopeless as he did years ago when he first started writing about his silent three year old boy who cries all the time.  That despite all the moments on the pages of his blog where he felt that he was helping carve through the jungles of autism with his machete he was still lost.  He was no expert....he had no more answers than any other parent out there...he just was a guy with a keyboard. 

This was the confession he needed to make:

That although he had spent the better part of the last decade writing about autism he was still just as full of shit as he was when he started.  The ramifications of that left him speechless and very tired.  Because it feels like his family are right back at the beginning again.  Autism has just as a tight of grip on them as it did years ago.  The battles are different, but the war remains the same.  Everything is different.  Everything is the same.  The cycle of worry and fret continues.  Admitting to that fact is what gives his hands pause as they drape themselves somberly across the keyboard.

The Blogger is unsure that he could ever  be able to make that confession to anyone else...let alone himself. 

Maybe he just did.

The Blogger's fingers start to dance across the keyboard again. 

Pray for him.  Pray for his family.

Things are different.
Things are the same.






Dead American Writers
by Tired Pony